Persistence

Marketing, Marketing Stamina, persistence

I had written yesterday how I felt so weak after getting the vaccination for COVID-19 that I had to cancel all my meetings with my team.

Today also the weakness continues so this post will also be short.

I had every inclination to not write this post, I could have given myself the excuse that I am not well.

But then I keep talking about being persistent day in and day out, so I would not be practicing what I preach, which would be an integrity problem.

Even if we do something in limited quantity but do it consistently so that the practice is not lost, whenever you get better , you will be able to scale up very fast.

This is also very true with your marketing. If you don’t want to have a Yo-Yo business then come what may, you have to ensure your marketing engine keeps running.

This is all for today.

Till next time

Carpe Diem!!!

Getting blindsided

B2B, Marketing, Product Management, Technology, Uncategorized

Yesterday I wrote about my experience taking the COVID-19 vaccine.

Well yesterday late night the side effects of taking the vaccine started showing. I had so much weakness that all night and all day today, I was only sleeping.

Why am I telling this. It’s a known fact that there are side effects of taking the vaccine.

What is important though is that I got blindsided by the intensity of the weakness. Due to this I had to cancel all my meetings today.

In the technology market you can get blindsided so very often. A lot of you may have heard of the mobile phone brand Nokia. It was the number one brand and then it got blindsided by Apple with their iPhone. Today you don’t even hear about Nokia mobile phones.

For a product manager in the technology space, where the pace of change is so rapid its very easy to get blindsided and suddenly your product is not needed by your customers.

For today, this is all since I am still having a lot of weakness.

Carpe Diem!!!

B2B Buying Processes in technology -II

B2B, differentiation, Marketing, Product Management, segmentation

While I keep talking consistently about segmenting the market and identifying niches, I also talk about identifying niches by use case rather by demographics and psychographics.

Typically in B2B buying especially when you are selling (I am using this term in a very broad way) to mid to large size companies there’s an hierarchy of positions within departments. In typical sales situations you want to identify a decision maker and then message to them. Unlike an individual or family buying a low value item where decisions are taken on the spot, in case of decisions which require substantial investment in technology buying, there are always multiple layers

In B2B buying there’s a someone who can say yes and a lot of people who can say no. However in most cases the decision maker herself does not evaluate the options. She typically would ask someone or some people in her team or make a cross functional team to evaluate the options and bring them to her and then she takes a decision.

Now this is where it gets tricky for the Product Management person. The decision maker does not evaluate options. The people who evaluate the options in today’s day and age are hidden because they do more than 60-70% of the sorting using the internet and reach out to specific companies whom they have shortlisted. So even if you have the most elaborate technical product, if you didn’t come in front of this team and this team does not evaluate you then you don’t stand a chance.

So how does the Product Management person identify the persona to whom the messaging has to be targeted. That’s what makes the B2B buying process complex for the marketing folks.

When you choose a very small segment of the market to target , the advantage is that you can do iterations in your messaging, you can actually interview prospects who didn’t buy from you and other things to identify what is resonating with your market and incorporate the learnings very fast.

This is not an easy task at all. Once you are able to “crack the code” as Dean Jackson puts it, you can scale in that market very fast.

Even now I have to learn so much in each new product we launch. Its never easy to say that because I launched a security product last year successfully I will be successful for a new AI product I am launching this year. While the frameworks can be in place and evolving, the learning is always new. But that’s what makes it interesting.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Sustained Lead Generation- keeping the funnel full

Business, differentiation, Marketing, messaging, Positioning, Product Management

Today is the financial year closing for all organisations in India. I had an extremely hectic day where we were trying to close a very large deal – which eventually slipped the deadline.

So again tomorrow morning we get back to figuring out how to get the deal in our favor.

As they say – There’s many a slip between the cup and the lip – so do large blockbuster deals have a way of going through multiple iterations before they fruitify.

That’s where having a sustained method of generating leads of average value orders makes a big difference to your pipeline. There’s better predictability in the system for your cash flows and you build the processes and infrastructure in your company to ensure that these orders can get revenued systematically without any chokes.

For most businesses however generating the sustained leads becomes a nightmare because we try to focus on too many things at the same time. If we were to focus on only a very few markets, by segmenting them and differentiating our offerings for each segment, there would not be too much of anxiety. The occasional blockbuster then can be managed within the existing system.

On the other hand if the growth is based on the back of the block buster while there’s no pipeline for sustained order booking then you are in for major challenges. Segmenting and niching the market is the only viable way for a Product Manager to ensure that they can get success in the market

Lets see what the new financial year has in store for us.

Till next time.

Carpe Diem!!!